Sakai has been an extremely successful open source project. The many leading universities around the world using the Sakai environment as their primary course management and academic collaboration system attest to this success. Yet, much has changed in the world over the lifetime of the Sakai project. There has been an explosion of online learning. In the United States alone, Sloan-C reported that over 4.6 million students — one in four American college students — took at least one online course in 2008. And since those numbers represent a 17% increase from the previous year, it is fair to expect that the numbers are now substantially higher. This trend is global. Meanwhile, the Internet itself has changed dramatically with the popularization of so-called "Web 2.0" technologies and the explosion of social networking.
The Sakai community was formed around the early recognition that software supporting academic collaboration should support a continuum between...